Also, having a low-footprint solution for embedded system communication would be really nice.  There still doesn't seem to be a commonly accepted standard for this: rosc is in alpha, simple_message is still in development, apparently people are already using DDS...  

I know the long term solution is for the embedded components to speak the "real" TCP protocol, but Clearpath has invested in rosserial— we developed and released last year a high performance C++ implementation of the ROS-side server node, which supports both serial and socket connections. Right now we just use it for the basics of topic pub/sub and serialization, but the intent is to provide reasonable support for services, parameters, and logging; that support will be in place sometime in the next six months, as we need it for an upcoming new product.

M.